Maiporé

Social housing where the public space comes first

Maiporé sits in Soacha, on the southern edge of the savanna, on sloping ground with the dry hills always in view. It is a large-scale development: big land, big blocks, many homes per hectare and a cold highland climate that asks for morning sun and shelter from the afternoon wind. 57Uno took on one of its blocks for Colsubsidio with a premise that reverses the usual order of social housing: public space is not what is left over at the end, it is what gets drawn first.

That is why the project is documented as a collection of public-space pieces rather than as a set of buildings. A sports park with a seven-a-side pitch, a jogging loop, a multi-use court, children's play, outdoor gym equipment and a skate bowl, all fitted into the slope without flattening it. A family park of rolling lawns where the ground itself makes the benches. A gathering park with a large oval lawn ringed by trees. And between them, the street section: a wide brick-paved footway, rows of trees, and a rain garden held by gabions that catches the water before it disappears into the drain.

The passive measures are stated from the outset and can be read in the drawings: natural ventilation, thermal comfort, natural light, rainwater reuse and a waste management masterplan that included a pilot block for plastics recycling. None of this calls for expensive technology. It calls for good orientation, good planting and letting water run where it can be seen.